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Ubuntu 23.10 Won’t Use Snap Printing Stack After All
(www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Apt is still widely used, especially for system packages. Some distributions mainly rely on flatpak for gui apps and suggest containers for services (docker, podman, ...) and user cli tools (distrobox).
Snap is different and can be used for packaging anything (e.g. gui, cli, services), including the kernel and the snap daemon.
Canonical is moving towards snaps and is expected to release a snap-only immutable Ubuntu distribution in the next year or two.
With snap being able to install gui and system apps it does what immutable Fedora uses rpm-ostree and flatpak for.
I personally don't like that Canonical tries to push snap as a distro agnostic packaging sustem as it lacks features on many non-Ubuntu distros. Flatpak is especially useful for proprietary apps because of simple sandboxing or apps not packaged yet. It's also the main way to install packages on many immutable distros. It also works on NixOS which formats like appimage don't support by default (no fhs).